Are you new to YouTube SEO? Do you need to polish up your knowledge? Here is a guide with comprehensive information you need to get on the road to professional quality YouTube SEO and, ergo, reach the widest audience possible. After all, you may create videos that are creative, insightful and spot-on for your YouTube audience but this only half the battle. YouTube is home to a ton of great content and if you want your channel and videos to succeed, you need to optimize them.

About Metadata

YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. Therefore, if you publish content on the platform, you better make sure you write optimized titles, tags and descriptions so your videos are easily discoverable and well indexed. The title of your videos, for example, is important for YouTube’s discovery systems and audiences to make sense of your content. A good practice is to keep them concise and include descriptive and relevant keywords early on in the titles. A video’s description field is also valuable real estate. As a matter of fact, put together, your video’s title, thumbnail and description should tell a cohesive story that compels people who come across your video to click on it. Tags, which are descriptive keywords, also play an important role in making sure YouTube’s discovery systems surface your videos to audiences.

Thumbnail Optimization

If YouTube is a platform where you publish content then you would know that thumbnails appear all across it in different sizes and formats and sometimes outside of it, for example, if you shared a link to a specific video in a post on your blog. Basically, thumbnails act as miniature marketing posters for your content and if you want to attract viewers and make them click through to watch your videos, you need to choose a strong and vibrant image that’s eye-catching and that accurately represents the content of your video. In particular the image needs to be clear, in-focus and of high resolution. It also needs to be well framed and have a good composition.

Use Annotations Wisely

By definition, annotations on YouTube are clickable text overlays on published videos. When used wisely, they can increase viewership, community actions on your videos, and subscribers. The challenge is to use relevant and helpful annotations and not obstruct the actual content of your videos. Other best practices for annotations are:

– Avoid positioning them in the lower third of videos and/or along the very top of the frame.

– Set annotations to open a new window or to open in the same window when clicked as appropriate making sure they are adding maximum value and not taking viewers away from your videos prematurely or getting in the way of the viewing experience. Read more

Founded in February 2007 and later acquired in 2013 by Yahoo! for over a billion dollars, Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking site that attracts tons of eyeballs and can be leveraged for business by marketers. Perhaps its popularity is best explained by the fact that it is a mix of WordPress, Facebook and Pinterest. After all, it has WordPress-like blogging functionality, Facebook-like social features and Pinterest-like image management. According to a post on DMR by publisher Craig Smith, as of April 2015, Tumblr has a reach of 420 million users with an average of 120,000 daily Tumblr signups. There are also other interesting Tumblr statistics and numbers relevant for brands. For example:

– Tumblr is home to 217 million Tumblrogs (blogs), a number much higher than on WordPress.

– Everyday 113.6 million posts are made on the microblogging platform and social networking site and the average post is reblogged 14 times.

– Every month, Tumblr receives 199.1 million global users, 69 million of which are US visitors and 50% of which access Tumblr on mobile.

– The number of monthly page views on Tumblr is 5.187 billion and the average time users spend on Tumblr is 12 minutes, 1.5 minutes longer than on Facebook.

With stats like these, as a digital marketer, you have no choice but to leverage the platform for business. The key is to know exactly what you need to do.

How to Use Tumblr for Marketing | 7 Good Practices

1. Use Great Images

Tumblr, as mentioned above is a mix of WordPress, Facebook and Pinterest. Therefore one thing that you can safely assume is that Tumblr posts that are photos and other images do well. They are also ideal for reblogging.

Founded in October 2006 and later acquired in May 2012 by LinkedIn, SlideShare is a slide hosting service that began with a simple goal: To help people share knowledge online. Since then, the service has grown into the world’s largest and most popular community for sharing presentations averaging approximately 60 million unique visitors a month according to data pulled in Q4 of 2013. SlideShare also features in the top 120 most visited websites in the world and is used by individuals and organizations ranging from Guy Kawasaki to the White House and Mashable.

SlideShare for Business

Whether you own an online shoe store or you help companies grow their revenue, SlideShare has many applications in marketing. For example, as you probably already know, presentations work great for content marketing so one of the ways a business could use SlideShare is as a content marketing tool. You could use it to:

1. Tell a Story

It’s a tried and tested theory that personal stories make the best content inspiration source but to amplify the impact of your message further, you could leverage the power of visuals using SlideShare.

2. Embed Slides into Landing Pages

Whether you need to give people a preview of a product you’re launching or you need to explain a concept to your readers, few things can beat a well-crafted SlideShare presentation, which is also very easy to embed into any landing page.

3. Enhance Your Blog Posts

A great blog begins with the content you create and while there are many types of posts that you can write on your blog that will do well, embedding SlideShare content into blog posts should rank pretty high up that list because readers love it.

4. Brand Yourself the Visual Way

No one goes to a SlideShare presentation hoping to come across huge chunks of text. It’s clearly a platform for visual communication and this makes it a great tool to introduce people to your brand and what you stand for in a recognizable fashion.

So SlideShare has many applications. The other benefit of the slide hosting service is that uploaded presentations have great potential to generate traffic for your website. The key is to optimize them for both your target audience as well as the search engines.

How to Optimize your SlideShare Presentations so You are Using the Service to its Full Potential

1. Make the First Slide Captivating

When it comes to content marketing, first impressions matter so if you’re creating a SlideShare presentation for your audience, don’t under estimate the power of your first slide. Not to mention that it will be used as the thumbnail everywhere including social shares whether on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest. Read more

Over the last decade or so, there has been an explosion of growth in the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as other platforms including LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest. There is no denying that this is the era of social media and for the foreseeable future, the need for businesses to incorporate social media into their marketing efforts will only become stronger. After all, the rising stats of the social networks speak for themselves.

1. Facebook has over 1.19 billion active users monthly. Basically, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest.

2. 1 in 5 young adults aged between 18 and 25 uses Twitter. The social network is currently adding 300K users per day.

3. YouTube reaches more US adults aged between 18 and 34 than any cable network.

In layman’s terms, whether you run a small, mid-size or enterprise level company, the statistics above clearly demonstrate that your customers are online. They are on the social networks looking for information and entertainment and interacting with friends, colleagues and brands. If you don’t leverage these opportunities for responsive communication and interacting with customers on a huge scale including those who are right down the street from you, make no mistake that your competitor will be doing just that.

Not to mention that social media can be a springboard for marketing success through other channels too because it takes your existing brand and solidifies it. It captures your company’s voice and propels it far and wide into the world opening up opportunities in other inbound marketing channels including but not limited to SEO, branding and public relations. Through social media, you can:

Build relationships with customers. These will then serve as the foundation upon which other aspects of your business will flourish including advocacy and loyalty.

Get feedback – on the social networks, information is shared at the speed of light so if you know how to take cues from your audience, social media can become an invaluable tool to gather insights and feedback.

And finally, when integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts including branding and PR, social media can help you create a scalable experience for your customers, which will, in turn, amplify and solidify your work.

So as a business, having a successful social media presence can have a far-reaching impact. But how do you know if you’re doing it right and your social media marketing efforts are paying off?

This is where social media metrics and ROI come into play!

The Importance of Social Media ROI

There is a bunch of reason why online marketing appeals to many businesses and one of them is the fact that you can measure nearly everything you do. Once you collect the data you need, you can derive actionable takeaways. The challenge it seems is to remember that measuring and collecting data is only effective if you know what to measure and why. The point is to measure any return on your investment (ROI). Read more